Read more about how these Black women are leading the charge for change in one of the whitest major cities in the United States.
In the midst of the new Black Lives Matter uprisings following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, President Donald Trump has attempted to make an example out of Portland and other so-called “radical left” cities. Nothing has illustrated this more intensely than his and the Department of Homeland Security’s July deployment of “rapid deployment teams” sent to protect Portland’s Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse. Terrorizing civilians, the officers consistently used excessive force, utilized expired chemical weapons, and ripped civilians off the street and into unmarked vans without explanation. After using Portland as a testing ground, Trump would go on to replicate this strategy in other major U.S. cities participating in the BLM uprisings.
Portland is one of the whitest major cities in the United States and has a long history of racist policies toward Black people. Today, Portland is one of the most rapidly gentrifying cities in the country, and is a current and historical hub for white supremacist organizations. White citizens of Portland often act as if people of color just don’t exist.
With all eyes on this deeply political and racially homogenous city, here are some Black women Portlanders who have been driving important political organizing long before the latest wave of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Teressa Raiford
Teressa Raiford is a fourth generation Portlander who, since founding the organization Don’t Shoot PDX in 2014, has in many ways carried the Black Lives Matter movement in Portland on her back. After the 2014 murder of unarmed Black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Raiford led the largest and most significant protests in the city. Raiford is currently running a powerful write-in campaign for Portland mayor after coming in third in the May primary.
On June 5th, Don’t Shoot PDX filed a class action lawsuit against the city of Portland alleging that law enforcement had been using tear gas indiscriminately during protests following the murder of George Floyd.The lawsuit resulted in a federal judge granting a temporary restraining order from using tear gas on protestors, a clear win for the organization.
Kayla Washington
Kayla Washington had always wanted to have a career where she could connect and contribute to her community. When her father, Jason Washington, was murdered by Portland State police officers in June of 2018, she felt even more compelled to get involved.
“[Organizing] is a new experience for me. I’m still learning as I go…I felt forced to [get involved] after my father died because I wanted to get his name out. I wanted to speak out about what happened,” she said in an email interview with AYO.
After meeting with the founder of PDX Black Excellence–a Portland-based cultural organization connecting the city’s Black residents–Washington was asked to join the movement and now serves as its Director of Operations. As a part of this objective to provide support to Black Portlanders, PDX Black Excellence also maintains a directory of Black owned businesses and community groups on its website.
“Our mission is to provide opportunities to bring both new and existing Black Portlanders together in an inclusive positive and enriching environment,” Washington says. “I was born and raised in Portland. [It’s] one of the least diverse cities in the country, so for me to meet and come together with more Black people…has been amazing. I have always felt that piece was missing in my life.”
Cat Hollis
While the Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent economic crisis have drastically changed all of our lives, these events have had an outsized effect on sex workers, who were wholly excluded from government assistance programs such as the CARES Act. This kind of criminalization is nothing new. On the contrary, it is the norm for sex workers. This is why Cat Hollis and the organization Haymarket Pole Collective, of which she is the founder, launched the PDX Stripper Strike in the midst of the pandemic. Stripper Strike’s organizers have been fighting for change from inside of the industry, pushing Portland strip clubs to commit to policy changes such as fairer hiring practices and cultural sensitivity training, as well as building up grassroots mutual aid resources for sex workers. As a result of these efforts, PDX Stripper Strike just received a grant from the Oregon Health Authority to distribute relief funds to sex workers of color (You can apply for those funds here).
“[A]lthough [Portland has] the most strip clubs per capita [in the U.S.]…that doesn’t necessarily mean that laborers in our industry know their rights,” says Hollis. “Many dancers have been led to believe that because they’re independent contractors they do not have basic rights that are the rights of any protected class. We have human rights to dignity and a right to work.”
Alyssa Pariah
Alyssa Pariah is a Black, trans, Boricua, Marxist powerhouse who helps organizations in the Portland activist scene convey their messaging in a way that is compelling, sincere, and loud. Pariah got her start organizing in 2009 at the Audre Lorde Project’s Trans Justice Community School in New York where she was the valedictorian of her graduating class. In 2012, Pariah moved to Portland where she continued to radicalize, and in 2014, she helped to start the Disarm PSU campaign at Portland State University, which worked to reverse the university’s Board of Trustees’ decision to create an armed police force on campus. In 2015, during the Disarm PSU campaign kick-off, Pariah powerfully interrupted a speech by then-university President Wim Wiewel in a video that went viral. After seven years of campaigning, Disarm PSUrecently had its first win: Portland State University announced that campus officers would no longer carry firearms beginning in Fall 2020. Pariah cites the achievement as one of the biggest moments in her organizing career.
Pariah says the most important part of her organizing is that “…people are forced to become accustomed to seeing trans women being forthright and open about the fight for justice, and not just in the context of fighting for trans equality.”
Britton Washington
After the 2017 police killings of Quanice Hayes and Terell Johnson in Portland, Britton Washington and a group of organizers ran a small sticker campaign at a popular street fair, which aimed to draw attention to the deaths of the two young Black men. This was the first act of Portland Equity in Action, later becoming the impetus for the PDX Billboard Project.
Washington was partially inspired by a billboard campaign in Milwaukie, Wisconsin, where Michael Bell put up a series of billboards calling for justice for his son, Michael Bell Jr., who was killed by police in 2004.
Today, Washington has put up over 25 billboards around the city, broadcasting powerful statements like “Portland, is your white fragility showing?,” “How many Black families were displaced so you could be here today?,” and “The most powerful thing is that I am changing the narrative.”
“Portland is so white,” says Washington. “You can’t center whiteness without this overall accepted narrative of whiteness as the norm, and so that’s the whole point of [the] billboards…is to literally disrupt that [narrative].”
Nicci Ramsey
Nicci Ramsey is a mental health provider who helped to found Empathy Riot, a collective of radical mental health practitioners, and is a member of Critical Resistance, a national organization working to build a movement to dismantle the prison industrial complex. As a mental health expert, Ramsey is drawn to spaces which organize at the intersections of mental wellness, social justice, and anti-policing work. When asked what feels most powerful about organizing in Portland, Ramsey said: “There’s a lack of fear. [People here are] saying the words, stirring the pot, bringing things to the foreground to make people feel uncomfortable. It’s refreshing to be in a space where there’s a lot of trauma, and a lot of pain, and a lot hope. It feels like a recipe for people to be reflective and to work towards change.”
